In the winter of 1835 revivalists and reformers thrilled
American audiences. Susan E. Lowe, a 17-year-old schoolgirl in Oneida, New York, was swept
away by a young man with a gift for public speaking. Augustus Wattles was a
"Lane Rebel," one of Cincinnati's idealistic students who'd
quit the Lane Seminary over issues of slavery and free speech. In Oneida the rebel issued a
rousing call to action.

Students at the Lane Seminary near Cincinnati

debated slavery and went on to create national issues.

As a white Quaker opposed to slavery, Wattles had once advocated
what was called Colonization, a movement to return freed slaves to settlements
in Africa. In the debates at the Lane Seminary he realized blacks had a right to remain. He told his Oneida listeners of his new beliefs that slavery should be abolished immediately and former slaves
educated in skills enabling them to succeed in the Land of the Free.

"Instead of merely spouting pretty words like the other
abolitionists, he had taken hold of the matter by the right end, and had taken
steps to improve the free colored and thus emancipate them from the scorn that
rests upon them in the North with the same weight as does servitude in the
South."

Thousands of refugees from slave states across the Ohio River had gathered in Cincinnati---some born free, many escapees, most lacking assets and hope. Wattles organized schools for Cincinnati's black men and boys and told his New York audience that he could be
educating girls and women too if he only had female volunteers. Susan Lowe came forward.

Girls in school 60 years after

Augustus Wattles's radical idea.

Wattles enlisted Susan and three other "Cincinnati Sisters" on his
lecture tour, each working without pay to create a school for enthusiastic
students. They boarded with their students' families, as teachers at the time
often did, but the Cincinnati Sisters caused a sensation. It was one thing to
extend charity to African-Americans, another to associate with them and treat
them as equals.

"The lady teachers…were daily
hissed and cursed, loaded with vulgar and brutal epithets, oaths and threats.
Filth and offal were often thrown at them as they came and went and the ladies
especially were assailed by grossest obscenity, called by the vilest of names
[and sent threats with] pictures of hearts thrust…with daggers; throats cut
off, etc."

Susan admitted she “realized not the danger which I might be
in till I had been there a number of weeks." Yet, she wrote to Wattles's good friend Theodore Weld, "We feel not in the least disheartened."
And in a shy postscript: "We find Brother Wattles every thing we could
desire in a coworker."

Becky Brown

Mercer County Star

Cincinnati is the black dot;

Mercer County the red star

She and Augustus married in 1836. Disheartened by prejudice in Cincinnati, the Wattles believed blacks might prosper in unspoiled country away from the bigotry and temptations of city life. The couple moved their
program north to Mercer County, Ohio, where the government offered land for
$1.25 an acre.Wattles spent his own inheritance and
probably some of Susan's family money to buy woodland near the western Ohio
border. Their plan was to raise funds to buy more land to issue to black
farmers, a sort of private homestead act before Congress devised one. The settlement, named Carthagena after the ancient
African city of Carthage, advocated temperance and utopian ideals on
30,000 acres divided into small farms.

Ex-slave Mary McCray remembered taking a
canal boat pulled by mules up the Miami and Erie Canal to Mercer County.
"On each of the farms there was a log cabin. Each farm contained eighty
acres." The land was uncleared, some of it covered with swamps, but Mary
was no stranger to hard work. She and her black neighbors created sustainable
small farms from the rough land.

Canal boat pulled by mules

The Wattles reserved 200 acres for their own farm and a
school and settled into married life with Susan's family as neighbors. She gave birth to four children in the decade they lived in Carthagena and often accompanied Augustus on the lecture circuit.

A cemetery is all that remains of Carthagena, Ohio today.

“Brother Wattles was here and
spoke one night to the great satisfaction of the people and to their infinite
merriment," wrote a fellow abolitionist. "From all that I can learn
he is doing wonders wherever he goes.” A member of his audience recorded his passion about the Mercer County colony, which
"he called Humanity’s Barn, where any human being might find a night’s
shelter.”

Maintaining a home for all humanity was a financial and
emotional strain, particularly for a manager so indifferent to practicality.
"Wattles is a strange fellow," wrote an antislavery editor,
"deficient in common sense." But friends found him an inspiration,
selfless and generous. "Dear noble, disinterested soul,” sighed Theodore
Weld. The community became temporarily solvent when trustees for the estate of
Samuel Emlen, a wealthy Quaker, offered $20,000 to create a manual arts and
agriculture school for African and Native American boys. They built the Emlen
Institute on their farm in the early 1840s.

Emlen Institute, Mercer County

Susan and Augustus taught here in the 1840s.

Mercer County's reputation as a haven for blacks reached
another trustee looking for a way to assist former slaves. Virginian John Randolph had left money in his will to buy
land for family slaves freed at his death. Randolph's executor bought $8,000 worth
of acreage. In 1846, 400 hopeful Virginians came up the canal from Cincinnati.

The Randolph Slaves gathered for a reunion

at the turn of the 20th century.

Mercer County's white settlers balked at accepting the newcomers. A mob formed in the town of New Bremen to prevent the refugees from disembarking. After a two-day standoff the passengers returned to Cincinnati and scattered to find homes in other Ohio counties.

Augustus Wattles in later years

After the 1846 uprising by their white neighbors many settlers left, including the
Wattles. Augustus was in bad health. Letters refer to depression
and a breakdown, possibly aggravated by malaria, then called ague, a disease
endemic in the Midwestern wetlands. Without his leadership the school and community
foundered. A year later, white bigotry increased to the point that blacks were
issued an ultimatum:

"Respectfully requested to leave the county on or
before the first day of March."

A decade later Susan and Augustus carried the war against
slavery into the new Kansas Territory, where their farm harbored people in
trouble, escaping slaves and fighters in the cause, most famously, radical John
Brown and his boys. The Wattles hid the Browns after they massacred several
Southerners along Pottawatomie Creek. A few years later they sheltered Missouri
slaves Brown brought through Kansas. In one of his last letters, written while
awaiting hanging in a Virginia jail, Brown remembered the women of the Wattles
family as "Angels of Mercy….Only last year I lay sick for quite a number
of weeks with them and was cared for by all."

The Kansas State Historical Society

owns this photo of the Wattles's house

in the now abandoned town of Moneka, Kansas.

KSHS also has the records of the Moneka

Women's Rights Association

which Susan and her daughter

Sarah Grimke Wattles signed.

Susan's voice became more public in Kansas, particularly
advocating women's rights. We find her protesting her exclusion from the
all-male Kansas Historical Society. With her sister-in-law and grown daughters
she organized an effective Women's Rights Association, the first in the
Territory. In 1880 a fellow suffragist described Susan as one
of the "women whose whole souls were in the work."

Mercer County Star

by Jean Stanclift

Mercer County Star is a new block with an old-fashioned look.The block is based on the traditional Ohio Star with a smaller star representing the county and the North Star, the runaway's beacon.

Dustin Cecil

Mercer County Star in Civil War Jubilee

I visited the site of Carthagena about five years ago.

St Charles Seminary was built near the cemetery....

A rather magnificent structure on the site

of the Wattles's simple school.

South of Mercer County is a small town named North Star, founded in the 1850s.

No one seems to remember how it got its name.

What We Can Learn About the Underground Railroad from
Susan Lowe Wattles' Story

Places like Mercer County remained a haven for former slaves
and free blacks only as long as the community welcomed them. The area along the
Ohio/Indiana border was initially settled by a good many people seeking a free
community, but as the prosperous farm land they created beckoned to more
settlers with different politics, the balance tipped. When the consensus of
opinion turned against them, refugees and idealists fled.

Make a Quilt a Month.

Set nine Mercer County Star blocks with a 2-inch sashing and a 3-inch border to get a quilt that is 50 inches square.

Esther Whinery Wattles was Susan's sister-in-law, married to
Augustus' brother John. Her own life was as exciting and generous as Susan's.
See a biography from Oberlin College Archives, which has her manuscripts.

"My husband,
Charles A. Munger had this book made for him and collected most of the
Autographs while in the Civil War, after he had been detailed by the War
Department, as clerk in the Adjutant General's Office. He enlisted in 117th
Regiment N. Y. Volunteers Aug. 8th 1862. At Waterville, N. Y."

An enterprising employee at the Ohio Penitentiary

collected autographs of Confederate prisoners of war

who served under General John Hunt Morgan.

Robert E. Lee

Carte-de-visite photos of officers were popular

and many collectors gathered autographed CDV's

into photograph albums.

Lincoln's secretary John Hay kept an autographed photo album.

Album quilts were also the fashion during the war.

Here's a signature from a quilt dated 1862 in the Historical Society of the Nyacks.

I don't know much about Civil War generals (I'd rather focus on Civil War hoopskirts) but both

McClellan and Fremont were not in Lincoln's good graces in 1864. McClellan ran against Lincoln for President that year. There were other Generals in higher regard then---Sherman and Grant, for example. Based on the choice of portraits I wonder if this might be a little earlier than 1864.

The printing style is not much help either. The scattered CDV portrait format is unusual, although the frame of checks is not

Saturday, February 1, 2014

Last week you got the first block for this year's block of the month and some of you are already thinking about settings. (These people are called planners.) I thought I'd show you four digital sketches for ideas to set the 12 blocks into a rectangular quilt.

This quilt is 68 x 84"

The setting strips finish to 4"

There is an inner border of 2" to finish out the stars.

The blue outer border finishes to 6"

The first one is the Star Set from Jean Stanclift's version we did a few years ago, which we called Chords of Memory.

Yardage required for Star Set:

Cornerstone stars: 3/4 yard. Jean used a medium blue.

Sashing Strips & Inner Border: 1-1/4 yards. Above it is a dark blue.

Outer Border: 2-1/4 yards similar dark blue. Jean used two different prints but if you want to use all the same for sash and borders buy 3-1/2 yards.

The second set is the Geese Set, which Becky Brown has finished.

She used a scrapbag of fat quarters of darks, lights and pinks. Here the sashing strips finish to 3" wide (3" x 12"). Right now the top's finishing 48" wide by 63" long.

Number 3 we are calling the Spiky Set, which Becky's working on right now. The tall triangle strips finish to 4" x 12" and at this point the top is 52" x 68".

Again the triangles are a scrapbag of dark prints and light plains. We used a variety of close Bella Solids whites and ivories from Moda for the light triangles.

We picked out about every other one from Fig Tree Cream to Together Tan.

And you may just want to use plain sashing, with or without cornerstones. The basic structure here: Sashing finishing to 4" with a 6" border,

The finished quilt: 64" x 80".

Yardage required for Plain Sashing:

Cornerstones: 1/2 yard

Sashing Strips: 1-1/2 yards

Border: 1-7/8 yards if you piece the strips.

2 yards if you cut strips the long way.

Cutting:

Cornerstones: Cut 20 squares 4-1/2" x 4-1/2"

Sashing Strips: Cut 31 strips 4-1/2" x 12-1/2".

Border: Cut 2 strips 6-1/2" x 68-1/2 for the sides.

Cut 2 strips 6-1/2" x 64-1/2" for the top and bottom.

We'll get instructions for the more complex sets together in the next few weeks so you can start piecing triangles if you want to.